Monetizing a site with 100K unique visitors

Here is a dilema for you:

The business model for one of the sites I own has changed drastically and I now am faced with trying to convert the traffic to additional sources of revenue. I am stumped as to the best course of action to take. If you had this problem, what would you do?

Details

Main Site online since 2000 with others being added along the way. In this niche we have 12 sites up, indexed, good PR and sending traffic to the main site.

Predicted PR - 6

Present PR - 5

Sub-Domain PR - 4

Unique Visitors - 100,000/month to main site

Backlinks - 5123

Pages indexed - 10,000 and most of them original content

Niche Markets - Gambling, Las Vegas, Poker

Misc1 - Any of our other sites we have put in our template footer as links have risen to PR4 almost immediately. This includes some 1 page sites we linked up just for fun.

Misc2 - We have many #1's in google and yahoo and can consistently rank on the first page for almost any keyword we target.


Over the last 7 years we have spent an enormous amount of time, effort and money to achieve success in the market we chose. With the change in the laws from country to country, we feel it is best to retire from the gaming affiliate market and find a new way to monetize our sites. Our sites make a tremendous amount of money now, but we don't like what is going on in the power struggles between different governments.

Here in lies the problem. We have thousands of pages dedicated to gaming and individual online rooms. If we take out the links to online gaming, how can we actually monetize the traffic? I thought about selling off the entire project, but have a love relationship with it and just can't let it go.

Assume the following:

We can use the site to rank well for any topic we choose (but would obviously take some time to do)

We have the design talent to produce basically anything we need for the web.

We can't use adsense as it is now because of the gaming links. I do have it on other sites that produce well, but honestly it is not a lot of money.

The real question are:

How can we use gaming traffic to make money in a non-gaming way?

What niche markets should we be trying as additional content?

Thanks for any comments you may have.

 

In order of most earning to less earning:
- Affiliates program (gaming related though)
- Pay per click (if allowed, non adsense of course -> there is bidvertiser.. you can use it in combination with pay per impression. But.. you might want to be picky if you don't want to flood your site with advertisements)
- Pay per impression

COMBINED WITH:
- Link sales (you have a good PR).. maybe add a seperate page.. for a directory and sell links of it. What do you think?

 

Yes, the gaming related affiliate programs are nice, but we just can't use them anymore.

What are the best affiliate programs to now target?

 

Live webcams, period.

 

there is www.cj.com ...

But since you can't use affiliates .. have you tried paid per impression? If you're getting that much traffic, might as well monetize it through that way? If you can get targeted payper impression for game related ads, you could get paid more.

 

If you're jumping out of the gaming market all together and the current pages will just sit there helping nobody you might want to look into ebay. I doubt it comes close to your referrals to casinos but you can at least get targetted gambling related items on the page without it being something that pisses various governments off.

As for my suggestion to target webcams, specifically one or two programs and it is probably the closest you will get to casino earnings out of anything.

Cheers

 

Thanks for the comments 30K Challenge. are there any programs you would personally recommend for the web cams?

I also took a look at your video blogs and may be interested for new content on some sites. How specific can I be in the type of content in them?

 

Are you saying that it is illegal for you to link to or promote gambling websites?

If not you could try selling monthly link spots to other gambling websites. But then if you can do that you should be able to have gambling affiliate links too.

As for this statement: "We can use the site to rank well for any topic we choose (but would obviously take some time to do)"

This is not entirely true since your inbound links and website will be associated with the gambling terms and you won't just be able to turn that around. Of course the 5000 link backs you have will help you if you change niche, but not as much as you'd think.

If you really can't monetize on gambling then it is probably best to sell the site altogether at a good price to someone who can, and invest wisely in an emerging profitable niche.

 

two things for Megadeals :

1 I think that is better that you sell the website.
what is the price ?

2 sorry What is your website ?

the vistators are 100K unique visitors to year ? to month ? to day ?

to month are good ...... to day it is impossibile....
__________________
Online Gambling
Gambling Dictionary
Directory Online Casino

 

Well, if you're thinking of using pop-ups/pop-unders, ClickSor pays about $7 per 1,000 unique visitors.

So, let's multiply that. $7 x 100,000 / 1,000 = $700 per month in your pocket.

How's that sound?

 

Not so great considering every single visitor will get pop-ups all the time on the page and will discourage them from ever coming back. Besides, out of those 100,000 visitors if he manages to find an affiliate program that converts even only 0.1% he'll probably end up making more than the pop-ups.

 

I thought about selling the site. It has been a love affair for years and has made a lot of money. $700 a month I am not interested in. I want to convert these pages to at least 50% of the present income (mid 5 figures per month and which is residual and continues to grow, btw).

 

Yes there is one specifically and a certain way to link to them that give better results. I will PM you in a few.

 

Try www.imlive.com for webcams ...... You can promote almost any type of mainstream site with them. And they pay very well ... and on time.
They pay $1.25 for free signups, 20% lifetime revshare and upto $125 dollars per normal signup.
Please note: This is a legitimate company that really pays. I am not here to mislead you in no way.

 

They really pay but I've had better luck with others.

Cheers

 

thanks 30K. i will wait for the PM

thanks for the link sparkling

 

Sell ebooks or sell links on your site

 

30K Challenge - I never did get the pm with the program information. Thanks in advance for sending it.

 

If i would be in your position i would stay in the gambling niche since this the kind of traffic you receive. The numbers you mention would be for me far to interesting to drop the whole offering of gambling type offers due to government restrictions.

It's better to investigate the possibilities to incorporate your hosting and business to another country that is not restricting you in any way.

I mean what is stopping you from doing that?

 

With that many visitors looking for stuff on gaming, poker and vegas... then i would say most of your visitors are men most likely between 20 and 40 ... so i would say throw up some true.com offers I am sure they would probably convert well as they use hot chics to pull the men in to singup.